Welcome, Friend.

You didn’t stumble onto this page by accident. Something brought you — a question you can’t quite shake, a version of faith that stopped working, a hunger for something more honest than what you were handed. Good. You’re in the right place.

My name is John Chaffee. I’m a spiritual director, author, and teacher — but before any of that, I spent twenty years as a pastor, in churches, in camps, and in prisons. I’ve sat across from people in every kind of exile: from God, from church, from themselves. This page exists to help you find, quickly, what you actually need from me — and where to start.

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Which One Sounds Like You?

You’re a pastor who is quietly dying inside your own calling. You still show up. You still preach, visit, counsel, administrate. But somewhere along the way the well went dry, and you’ve been running on fumes for longer than you’d admit out loud. You’re not losing your faith — you’re losing yourself, one Sunday at a time.

You left church and have never quite found the words for why. It wasn’t one thing. It was a slow accumulation — a hundred small betrayals, a theology that stopped making room for your questions, a community that couldn’t hold your grief. You don’t call yourself an atheist. You just can’t go back to what was.

You’re still in the pew, and you’re terrified no one else is asking what you’re asking. From the outside, nothing has changed. On the inside, everything has. You sing the songs. You say the creed. And underneath it, a question keeps surfacing that you’re not sure is safe to say out loud here.

You’re in the dark night, and it has gone on longer than anyone told you it would. Aridity. Numbness. The prayers that used to work and now just echo. This isn’t a crisis of belief you can think your way out of — it’s a desert, and deserts take the time they take. You don’t need someone to rush you out of it. You need a witness.

You’re a leader — in a company, a church, a nonprofit — and your inner life has fallen behind your outer responsibilities. You’re competent, respected, exhausted in a way your calendar can’t explain. You sense that your spiritual formation stalled somewhere around seminary, or somewhere around your first promotion, and you want to close that gap before it costs you something you can’t get back.

You’re drawn to the mystics, the desert fathers and mothers, the contemplatives — and you don’t know where to begin. Merton, Nouwen, the Cloud of Unknowing, the Beguines. You’ve felt the pull of something ancient and unhurried, but you need a guide, not just a reading list.

You love someone who is walking through all of this, and you don’t know how to walk beside them. Your spouse, your adult child, your closest friend — they’re deconstructing, or drying up, or disappearing into questions you don’t share. You’re not looking to fix them. You’re looking to understand.

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What I Actually Offer

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Not Sure Which One?

If nothing above made the decision obvious, start with the newsletter. It costs nothing, it arrives once a week, and it will teach you more about how I think and what I believe than any page on this site could. From there, the next right step tends to become clear on its own.

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Closing

Whatever brought you here, I don’t take it lightly. My prayer, most days, is simple: Lord, let me help someone today. If that someone is you, I’d be glad to walk with you.

— John

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